Friday, 15 June 2012

Chronic Gridlock, Growing Pains, And Failing To See The Elephant In The Room (it's mass immigration stupid!).

A few articles appeared in the Toronto Star about Toronto's chronic gridlock problem and as should be expected not one dared to notice the elephant in the room.

One was printed today about the ten most congested arteries in Toronto. Of the ten only two are located downtown. The other eight are located outside the downtown core in areas heavily settled by immigrants but no one seems to have bothered to notice this. They have noticed, or are at least partially blaming, the contributions the condo boom is having on traffic and we all know by now who is a major player in Toronto's condo market (hint: look east towards Asia).

The condominium boom is being blamed for the fact that five of the city’s 10 most congested intersections are on Sheppard Ave.

Councillor David Shiner, whose Willowdale ward has two of the busiest at Sheppard and Bayview and Sheppard and Leslie, says it’s only going to worsen as more developments get approved.

“You haven’t seen nothing yet,” Shiner said, during discussion Thursday about the clogged intersections at council’s public works and infrastructure committee.

Shiner noted that just this week, the North York community council gave its blessing to 4,000 new condo units, the latest phase in a massive 20-hectare development on Sheppard between Bayview Ave. and Leslie St.

Solutions being proposed invariably mean taxpayers in Toronto and the surrounding area can expect their wallets to get lighter and bank accounts smaller because higher taxes and toll roads are on the way.

In a refreshing departure from the wilful blindness exhibited by some civic leaders (Mayor Rob Ford, take a bow), McCallion unabashedly called for new taxes to ease gridlock choking traffic flow — and the economy — in the Greater Toronto Area.

She carried that message to Queen’s Park, meeting with Premier Dalton McGuinty, but it isn’t yet certain if the government will listen.

The implementation of toll roads has been generating a lot of discussion as a solution to ease traffic gridlock and fund public transportation.

But like I said everyone is wilfully blind to the elephant in the room and refusing to acknowledge that mass immigration is the major cause of all of this. Toronto's neighbour to the east, Mississauga, provides a lesson on how this came to be.

Mississauga is also feeling the effects of gridlock but why shouldn't it because it too is being swamped with immigrants due to spillover like when you fill up the sink with too much water and keep on doing so even though everything in the surrounding area is getting wet.

The suburban dream of high lifestyle and low taxes has come crashing to earth. The old model of growth-by-development-charges no longer applies. Although it is unfolding first in Mississauga, the same fate awaits any number of sprawl cities in the GTA and beyond.{...}

In the end, though, was the stark truth of a 7.4 per cent city property tax increase (before the regional increase is factored in), something that doesn’t sit well in a jurisdiction that long prided itself on being the next best thing to free.{...}

Despite its relative youth — Mississauga was incorporated in 1974 — it has hit middle age with a thud. The city whose main claim to fame was that it had no public debt is now looking for $450 million to stay afloat.

In the meantime, infrastructure is starting to fall apart. Built as cheaply and quickly as possible, it was intended to allow for growth, not accommodate a community. Little wonder, then, that Mississauga’s infrastructure deficit is expected to hit $1.5 billion in the next 20 years.

Even the city’s roads department — that holy of holies — faces cuts. Though traffic numbers are going up drastically, future projects will have to be curtailed by $25 million, and the annual $2.8 million funding gap for road repairs will soar to $8.2 million by 2016.

Before you know it you're knee deep in water and worried about the damage the water is causing. You ponder how to effectively address the rising tide failing to realize, to your detriment, that all you have to do is turn off the damn tap.

This is how the debate over Toronto's traffic gridlock is. It's like everyone woke up one day and realized that Toronto's traffic is terrible and that we should do something about it but never give consideration to what's causing it. And they never will. They do know mass immigration is the problem but since it's politicians who are doing the talking and are reliant on the immigrant vote they don't wish to cause any offence for the sake of their political careers.

This is yet another example of when a better life for you means a worse life for us. When immigration is discussed it typically avoids the effects it has on the host society yet we feel those effects everyday when we commute in the nation's major cities, especially here in Toronto. While public transit can help alleviate gridlock it's no solution to the socially damaging effects - and environmentally damaging effects - of mass immigration on the nation's cities and our lives because public transit gets crowded too. So much in fact that it is often better to avoid it and walk a few blocks if you can.

This also illustrates how mass immigration is affecting us financially. We are now facing the prospects of higher taxes and toll roads (also a tax increase) for the sake of mass immigration, diversity, multiculturalism and all that nonsense Canadians don't really care about but are told we want for some reason. My proposal, the one never considered, is cut immigration altogether. We don't need the numbers we're bringing in as they are far too high already and it's clear immigration is the problem here. And solving the problems immigration is creating means more money out of Canadians' pockets whereas what I propose would save us money in the short and long-term. Besides large cities do not necessarily make better cities.